Using giveaways to drive retweets can be a great way to not only engage your existing audience, but also drive social sharing which will put your giveaway (and brand) in front of a new, relevant audience who are likely to check out who you are and get involved with the giveaway themselves.

Setting up this type of giveaway is a walk in the park. You just have to Tweet about the promotion, making sure to showcase your prize and provide clear entry instructions.

Then all that's left is to randomly draw a winner once your giveaway has run it's course.

The easiest way to randomly pick winners from retweets is using an online retweet picker tool to pick a random retweet. The best option is Tweetdraw. It requires no sign up and all you need to do is connect your Twitter account, add the URL of your Tweet and draw a winner.

Or if you have an exported list of all the @usernames you can use our Random Username Picker to put them all into a list and just generate the winner.

As convenient as this approach is, it isn't without it's limitations. The primary drawback being that using a simple retweet picker limits your giveaway to only driving retweets.

Even something as simple as asking users to follow you as well will require you to manually validate if the winning retweet came from a follower.

One of the biggest benefits of running a promotional giveaway is the ability to drive a wide array of meaningful actions that will help you boost engagement and grow your brand. If you limit yourself to asking for retweets then you're simply not taking full advantage of the massive opportunities that giveaways provide.

If you want to run a powerful giveaway on Twitter (and beyond) that automatically validates and records entries, gives you a transparent and reliable way to draw winners, and enables you to drive a wide array of powerful actions then you should take a look at Gleam's Competitions app.

When you run your giveaway with Gleam you'll be able to use our retweet action to drive social sharing on Twitter. Plus, you'll be able to easily drive other awesomely powerful actions like Twitter follows, tweets, website visits, checking you out on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, newsletter sign-ups, social referrals and much more.

Take a look at this demo we put together to see what your own giveaway could look like with Gleam:

The only real downside of taking this approach is that users won't be able enter your giveaway just by interacting with your Tweet. Instead you'll have to tweet and share a link to a giveaway page on your own website or one of our hosted landing pages where users can enter your campaign.

While this does make immediate entry slightly more challenging for users the pros vastly outweigh the cons. You won't just be able to drive more meaningful actions, you'll also be able to promote your giveaway across all your platforms including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

This will allow you drive retweets and other powerful actions from users across all of your social channels, which will help skyrocket participation, cross-pollinate your social followings and maximise the overall impact of your giveaway.

Run Your Own Twitter Giveaway With Gleam

Take a look at Gleam's Competitions app and see how you can use it to perfectly execute your next giveaway.